Why Lujan Grisham is the right choice

This November we choose a new governor. After eight years of population decline and economic stagnation under Gov. Susana Martinez, we have a chance to change course. The outcome of the governor’s race will have profound consequences for New Mexico for decades to come. Let’s get to know the candidates and vote.

Under Gov. Martinez, we’ve all learned the consequences of tying New Mexico’s economy to the roller-coaster economics of the international oil industry. While our neighboring states have pulled out of the recession and are thriving, New Mexico is losing population. New Mexico will only excel when we emphasize renewable energy, information technology and tourism based on our beautiful state.

Under Martinez, young people have been leaving New Mexico in large numbers. Young people are our future, but they need professional career level jobs in advanced industries like information and renewable energy to keep them here. Republicans just won’t get this because of their deep ties to the oil industry.

Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce wants to pick up where Martinez leaves off. Both Martinez and Pearce were born in Texas and lived in oil country on the Texas border. Steve Pearce owned an oil services company before he became a politician. In Congress and as a candidate, Pearce has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil industry and has a singular focus on oil as our energy future.

While the oil industry provides some jobs, most of them are temporary, dangerous and transient, with low education requirements. The industry pollutes ground water, permanently damages landscapes and is the largest producer of greenhouse gases that cause global warming according to scientists worldwide.

In 2010 Pearce told Politico that climate science is “crap,” and he told Mother Jones in 2014 that world temperatures “have been very stable for the last 17 years,” contradicting NASA scientists who know the last four years to be the hottest on record and note a steady rise in world temperatures since 1950. In response to overwhelming scientific evidence that fossil fuel burning is driving global warming, Pearce voted to stop federal agencies from studying the costs or impacts of climate change.

Beyond ignoring the international scientific consensus on climate chaos, Pearce has voted in Congress to block pollution controls on the oil and coal industries. He voted to stop ongoing Pentagon efforts to respond to climate change while voting to expand oil drilling into the most sensitive environments on Earth, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Bristol Bay in Alaska, where a majority of the world’s salmon live and breed.

Pearce also voted to stop efforts to control pollution from oil wells that are causing a huge cloud of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in parts of Northern New Mexico. He voted to make oil drilling the primary use of national forests and the Bureau of Land Management lands (that Americans all own together) and he voted to restrict public input into Bureau of Land Management decisionmaking. At the same time, he has supported weakening the Endangered Species Act on behalf of oil and ranching interests.

Like President Donald Trump, Steve Pearce opposes renewable energy which is our solution to the climate crisis and a huge economic bright spot for New Mexico. He voted to eliminate the Department of Energy’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs back in 2012. Fortunately wind and solar are thriving without government subsidies. Still, federal energy efficiency standards are critical to our national future.

New Mexico must advance into a modern, post-oil, post pollution economy.

Michelle Lujan Grisham — a Democratic U.S. representative from Albuquerque — will lead that change as governor of New Mexico.

Tom Ribe lives in Santa Fe.